The USA and the UK are enmeshed in an appar­ently unend­ing war of attri­tion – sorry peace­keep­ing — in Iraq. Why? Well, we may remem­ber that the UK was assured by former Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair, in sin­cere terms, that Sad­dam Hus­sein pos­sessed weapons of mass destruc­tion which could be deployed again Brit­ish interests within 45 minutes. Indeed the press was awash with “45 minutes from Armaged­don” head­lines on 18th March 2003, the day of the cru­cial war debate in the Brit­ish par­lia­ment. The implic­a­tion was that Bri­tain was dir­ectly at threat from the evil Iraqis.

The US var­ied the diet. George Bush, in his State of the Union address before the war, assured his nation that Iraq had been attempt­ing to buy mater­ial to make nuc­lear weapons from Niger. The Amer­ican media and pub­lic fell for this claim, hook, line and sinker.

What do these two erro­neous claims have in com­mon? Well, both were “sexed up” for pub­lic consumption.

We all know now that there never were any WMDs to be found in Iraq. After 10 years of pun­it­ive sanc­tions, the coun­try simply didn’t have the cap­ab­il­ity, even if it had the will, to develop them. The Niger claim is even more tenu­ous. This was based on an intel­li­gence report eman­at­ing from the Brit­ish Secret Intel­li­gence Ser­vice (com­monly know as SIS or MI6), which was based on forgeries.

We have had head­line after scream­ing head­line stat­ing that yet another ter­ror­ist cell has been roun­ded up in Bri­tain. The Ricin plot? The behead­ing of a Brit­ish Muslim ser­vice­man? The liquid bombs on air­planes? Yet, if one reads the news­pa­pers care­fully, one finds that charges are dropped quietly after a few months.

So, why is this hap­pen­ing? I can haz­ard a few guesses. In the 1990s I worked for 6 years as an intel­li­gence officer for MI5, invest­ig­at­ing polit­ical “sub­vers­ives”, Irish ter­ror­ists, and Middle East­ern ter­ror­ism. In late 1996 I, with my then part­ner and col­league David Shayler, left the ser­vice in dis­gust at the incom­pet­ent and cor­rupt cul­ture to blow the whistle on the UK intel­li­gence estab­lish­ment. This was not a case of sour grapes – we were both com­pet­ent officers who reg­u­larly received per­form­ance related bonuses.

How­ever, we had grown increas­ingly con­cerned about breaches of the law; ineptitude (which led to bombs going off that could and should have been pre­ven­ted); files on politi­cians; the jail­ing of inno­cent people; illegal phone taps; and the illegal spon­sor­ing of ter­ror­ism abroad, fun­ded by UK tax-payers.

The key reason that we left and went pub­lic is prob­ably one of the most hein­ous crimes – SIS fun­ded an Islamic extrem­ist group in Libya to try to assas­sin­ate Col­onel Gad­dafi in 1996. The attack failed, but killed inno­cent people. The attack was also illegal under Brit­ish law. The 1994 intel­li­gence Ser­vices Act, which put SIS on a legal foot­ing for the first time in its 80 year his­tory, stated that its officers were immune from pro­sec­u­tion in the UK for illegal acts com­mit­ted abroad, if they had the prior writ­ten per­mis­sion of its polit­ical mas­ter – ie the For­eign Sec­ret­ary. In this case they did not.

So, the assas­sin­a­tion attempt was not only immoral, uneth­ical and highly reck­less in a volat­ile area of the world, but also illegal under Brit­ish law.

In August 1997 we went pub­lic in a national Brit­ish news­pa­per about our con­cerns. We hoped that the newly-elected Labour gov­ern­ment would take our evid­ence and begin an invest­ig­a­tion of the intel­li­gence agen­cies. After all, many Labour MPs had been on the receiv­ing end of spook invest­ig­a­tions in their rad­ical youth. Many had also opposed the dra­conian UK law, the Offi­cial Secrets Act (OSA 1989), which deprived an intel­li­gence whis­tleblower of a pub­lic interest defence.

How­ever, it was not to be. I have no proof, but I can spec­u­late that the Labour gov­ern­ment did the spies’ bid­ding for fear of what might be on their MI5 files. They issued an injunc­tion against David and the national press. They failed to extra­dite him from France in 1998 but, when he returned vol­un­tar­ily to face trail in the UK in 2000, they lynched him in the media. They also ensured that, through a series of pre-trial legal hear­ings, he was not allowed to say any­thing in his own defence and was not able to freely ques­tion his accusers. Indeed the judge ordered the jury to convict.

The whole sorry saga of the Shayler affair shows in detail how the Brit­ish estab­lish­ment will always shoot the mes­sen­ger to pro­tect its own interests. If the Brit­ish gov­ern­ment had taken Shayler’s evid­ence, invest­ig­ated his dis­clos­ures, and reformed the ser­vices so that they were sub­ject to effect­ive over­sight and had to obey the law, they may well be work­ing more effi­ciently to pro­tect us from threats to our national’s secur­ity. After all, the focus of their work is now counter-terrorism, and they use the same resources and tech­niques as the police. Why should they not be sub­ject to the same checks and balances?

Instead, MI5 and SIS con­tinue to oper­ate out­side mean­ing­ful demo­cratic con­trol. Their cul­tures are self-perpetuating olig­arch­ies, where mis­takes are glossed over and repeated, and where ques­tions and inde­pend­ent thought are dis­cour­aged. We deserve better.

In this remark­able book, Annie Machon makes ser­i­ous alleg­a­tions against the Brit­ish state’s intel­li­gence ser­vices, MI5 and MI6. Ms Machon and her part­ner David Shayler are former high-ranking MI5 officers, both now retired from the ser­vice. The book’s alleg­a­tions derive from their exper­i­ences and deserve at least to be the sub­ject of inquiry.

She asserts that MI5 has illeg­ally invest­ig­ated thou­sands of Brit­ish cit­izens for their polit­ical views; that there was col­lu­sion between the Army Forces Research Unit and loy­al­ist ter­ror­ists; that MI5 failed to stop four major ter­ror­ist attacks in Bri­tain, even though it had reli­able evid­ence; and that MI5 and MI6 let a known Libyan ter­ror­ist into Bri­tain and let him set up a ter­ror­ist net­work here.

She alleges that MI6’s counter-Iranian sec­tion used the Sunday Tele­graph (and the journ­al­ists Con Cough­lin, John Simpson and Dominic Lawson) to try to blame Iran for the 1988 Lock­er­bie bomb­ing, the destruc­tion of flight PA103. MI6 was try­ing to deflect atten­tion from the fact that it was actu­ally a Libyan retali­ation for the US bomb­ing of Tripoli (backed by Thatcher) in 1986.

The book’s most sig­ni­fic­ant alleg­a­tion is that MI6 illeg­ally paid tens of thou­sands of pounds to Al-Qa’ida in 1995–96 to assas­sin­ate Col­onel Gad­dafi and seize power in Libya. In the attemp­ted coup, sev­eral inno­cent civil­ians and secur­ity police were killed. If this is true, MI6, a Brit­ish state agency, sponsored our ter­ror­ist enemies in a con­spir­acy to murder, which res­ul­ted in the killing of inno­cent civilians.

But Blair refuses to hear any evid­ence against the intel­li­gence ser­vices, and pro­sec­utes and har­asses crit­ics and whis­tleblowers. The Intel­li­gence and Secur­ity Com­mit­tee, set up under the 1994 Intel­li­gence Ser­vices Act to over­see the ser­vices, is no use, because it is appoin­ted by and reports only to the Prime Minister.

The intel­li­gence ser­vices should work under the rule of law and respect demo­cratic rights. Ter­ror­ist sus­pects should be arres­ted and brought to trial under crim­inal law, not detained, or executed, without trial, as has happened in North­ern Ire­land and elsewhere.

The intel­li­gence ser­vices are sup­posed to pro­tect us, but it would appear that they have instead con­nived in ter­ror­ism, put­ting us at greater risk of ter­ror­ist attack.

The Cam­paign for Press and Broad­cast­ing Free­dom (CPBF) also high­lighted it.

My CCC talk in Ber­lin in Decem­ber 2007 about the role of Intel­li­gence agen­cies in society.

In the name of pro­tect­ing national secur­ity, spy agen­cies are being given sweep­ing new powers and resources. Their intel­li­gence has been politi­cised to build a case for the dis­astrous war in Iraq, they are fail­ing to stop ter­ror­ist attacks, and they con­tinue to col­lude in illegal acts of intern­ment and tor­ture, euphemist­ic­ally called “extraordin­ary rendi­tion”. Most west­ern demo­cra­cies have already given so many new powers to the spies that we are effect­ively liv­ing in police states. As an informed com­munity, what can we do about this?

About Annie

Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer for MI5, the UK Security Service, who resigned in 1996 to blow the whistle on the spies' incompetence and crimes. Drawing on her varied experiences, she is now a media pundit, author, journalist, political campaigner, and PR consultant. More

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